At a conference this week urging celibacy for Catholics with “same-sex attractions,” speakers described gay sex as risky and dangerous, and likened it to putting a piece of a bagel into one’s ear.

Speakers also said that discouraging same-sex relations is not bigotry, and one revealed that a member of his family is gay, the Detroit Free Press reports.

The conference, titled Welcoming and Accompanying Our Brothers and Sisters with Same-Sex Attraction, opened Monday and ended Wednesday in Plymouth, Mich., near Detroit. One of the its organizers is Courage International, a church-sanctioned ministry aimed at helping gay and lesbian Catholics stay celibate.

In a lecture titled “HIV and Other Health Risks Associated with Men Who Have Sex With Men,” HIV researcher Timothy Flanigan, MD, warned against sex between men, the Free Press reports. “Male sex, anal sex facilitates the spread of all sorts of diseases ... bacterial infections, parasitic infections ... anal sex is risky, dangerous. ... And oral sex also carries with it its own risks as well,” he said.

The Rev. John Riccardo, a priest at a Plymouth parish, made the bagel analogy, which he said is useful in talking to young people. He said junior high students sometimes ask him why God hates gays, and he responds that God doesn’t hate gays but that gay sex is unnatural.

He said he tells students, what if “I just rip open a bagel, I take it, and I cram it in my ear. What would you say?” When they respond, “That doesn’t go there,” he says, “Exactly,” and that doing so “will ruin your ear canal.”

Riccardo said he has a family member with a lesbian daughter. She welcomes the daughter and her partner into her home, he said, but she tells them, “When you are here, you will not sleep together … because I think that’s harmful, and here are the reasons why.”

He also said, “The goal here isn’t going from being gay to being straight. The goal here is going from not knowing Jesus to knowing Jesus.”

Detroit Archbishop Allen Vigneron, who delivered the closing Mass Wednesday, said “It’s not being a bigot” to take a stand against same-sex relations. He praised those who are helping gays and lesbians “grow in chaste continence ... share in the chastity of Jesus Christ.”

The conference’s message did not go over well with all Catholics. An LGBT-supportive group that protested outside the venue included several members of Fortunate Families Detroit, an organization for Catholics who embrace their LGBT family members without reservation.

“It’s medieval times all over again. ... If God created people gay, then gay sex seems to be a natural thing,” Tom Nelson, a member of Fortunate Families Detroit, told the Free Press. The church, he said, “hasn’t come to speed with the 21st century.”